excessive, and we owe entirely to the kindness of Mr. W. H. Macaulay, of King's College, the presentation of our problem to the authorities of the University Registry and the arrangements for supplying the necessary data. We have heartily to thank both him and the officers at the Registry for aid in this matter. We thus obtained the addition to our cards of the exact nature, honours or poll, class-place, subject (science, theology, literature, &c.) of the degree taken by each individual. We were then provided with a most valuable mass of material for testing how far any of the chief physical characters are correlated with a fairly comprehensive scale of ability, or with the special intellectual tastes of the measured.
There is work in this mass of material, reducing and classifying it, for one or two good calculators during several years. At present no attempt has been made to reduce it, except in one special direction that of the correlation of intellectual ability with the shape of the head. This is the subject of the present preliminary notice. The tables in this case were prepared partly by myself and partly by my assistant, Mr. E. Blanchard, B.A., of Caius College. Nearly the whole work of calculation is due to Dr. Alice Lee and Miss M. A. Lewenz, B.A. The conclusions, therefore, are a co-operative product of the biometric workers associated with me at University College, London.
(2.) Dr. Lee, in a paper " A First Study of the Correlation of the Human Skull," published in the Phil. Trans.,' A, vol. 196, pp. 225-264, has presented a considerable amount of evidence to show that " there is no marked correlation between skull capacity and intellectual power " (p. 259). We have found this result frequently contested and a very definite statement made that able men have large heads. We cannot find, however, that there are really reliable statistics, adequately treated, which in any way prove this general statement. It is perfectly true that the professional classes in this country have a rather larger head than the hand-working classes, and the former are rather more intellectual ; but they are taller and physically more developed also, and the whole difference is most probably due to better nurture. One of our number, Dr. W. R. Macdonell, has recently shown that the head of the Cambridge undergraduate is larger than the head of the criminal population,* but any deduction from a mixture of these two classes (that ability is correlated with size of head) would be wholly misleading. We must take a homogeneous class of approximately the same nurture and habits, and inquire whether there is any correlation between ability and size of head within this class. It is this which we have attempted to do with the Cambridge statistics.
(3.) For our present purposes we have made a very broad classifica- tion of Cambridge men into poll and honours men. There are occasion- ally poll men who undoubtedly are intellectually stronger than some
- " On Criminal Anthropometry . . .," ' Biometrika,' vol. 1, pp. 185, 188, &c.
